Sen. Tom Coburn releases plan, attacked by Norquist

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has issued his plan for $9 trillion in deficit cuts over the next decade, more than doubling the $4 trillion “grand bargain” that fell apart over GOP resistance to any action on taxes. Coburn includes nearly $1 trillion in cuts to “tax expenditures,” or tax breaks (such as ethanol tax credits) that operate identically to spending programs. The Simpson Bowles commission recommended eliminating tax expenditures as a way to reform the tax code and raise revenues, now at a 50-year low.

Find the plan here, and the summary here. They are worth a careful read.

The report said General Electric uses tax breaks to obtain a negative tax liabiity, receiving $4.7 billion from other taxpayers over the last three years, and that 18,000 individuals earning more than $200,000 a year used tax breaks to reduce their personal income taxes to zero. And that one family deducted the cost of their cat, on the grounds that it kept rodents out of their junkyard.

Coburn also calls for huge cuts in domestic programs, especially agriculture, whacks $1 trillion out of the military, and takes $2.6 trillion out of Medicare and Social Security.

That apparently isn’t good enough for conservative interest groups. Grover Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform, took several seconds to pillory Coburn for offering a “$1 trillion tax hike plan.”

So ethanol and other tax subsidies are worth more to “conservatives” than a historic deal with a Democrat on entitlements.